TIMELESS VIVACITY
 
 
Louis <louis09@frontiernet.net> Sun, May 7, 2017 at 6:34 AM
To: maryvolmer@gmail.com
 
 Hi –
Gary Sack is over there on a boat.
I gave him your number. 
Lou
 
 
Lou is my uncle. Over there is Northern England, where I’m living in a village south of Manchester until August. Gary Sack? No idea. Lou swings with impressive agility between paranoia and complete and absolute trust in oddball, and mostly harmless strangers. So when Gary calls, the next day, and invites me “and the kiddies” to join him on a boat in a canal near Nantwich I say sure, why not? How about Monday?

As a precaution I leave the “kiddy” at preschool, though by now I’ve learned Gary has been Lou’s buddy since college. By mom’s cautious definition, he is a “character,” and though the canal and the boats, and the story I might find, are my excuse, it’s Gary, I’m driving to see. 

On the phone he told me to show up “whenever. I’ve got nothing but time,” he said. But, of course, I’ve planned the trip to the minute. I’ll get up early to run, which will leave me time to work after I drop my son off. It should take about thirty-five minutes to drive to Nantwich, and if I leave at noon, I’ll have three hours before I need to be back to pick up the kiddo--who could also be an excuse to leave early, if I need one. I’ll be home in time to grocery shop and scribble some notes before dinner.

It’s a windless mid-May afternoon of sunlight and broken clouds. I shun the M-6 and, putting my faith in the satnav, drive through small towns on unmarked roads, hemmed by hedgerows and newly plowed fields, before parking, on schedule, in a pay lot in Nantwich. A sign proclaims this to be a “historic market town,” but the distinction is boasted, so far as I can tell, by three of every four towns in Northern England. There’s no sign of the canal and the first person, I see, a bald man in a baby blue tracksuit, rushes past me and my inquiry. The second, a woman also in a hurry, red hair perfectly curled, points vaguely north and dismisses me with the same gesture.

On this information, I walk a half-mile away from City Center, past two pubs, a school, countless red brick homes, one like another up Welshmen Road, and nearly turn back. If I hadn’t spotted a small white sign for the marina, I might have; from a distance the marina looks like nothing more than a railroad embankment and bridge. Climbing the steps, I find a curving channel of brown water teeming with boats, most of them long, narrow, steel hulled canal boats, docile as large animals grazing. The few people I see lounging in folding chairs on water’s edge, ignore me effortlessly. They, like the boats, look moored.

I’m supposed to walk toward the chandlery. I could ask the way, but I suddenly feel, even more than I did upon arriving in this country three months before, like a foreigner. I make a lucky guess and walk north up the towpath, following an old fellow and his fluffy mop dog. A young man trims the grass with a terrible roaring racket. Hay and sheep fields unfold in the distance. The lawn mower quits; in the interval: bird song, the hum of a short wave radio, the cathedral bells strike one. And then I see Gary.
 
Gary’s boat to be exact, a faded little fiberglass Vivacity 20, all but dwarfed by steel- hulled neighbors. He’s taken the mast off; a solar panel fixed to the cabin roof powers the small electric motor. Inside the cabin is a sleeping bag, camp stove, an orange cook pot, bags of potatoes, onions, rice and beans, bottled water, and a piss pot. “You look like your cousin,” Gary says by way of hello.

Gary might have walked out of the pages of a gold rush history book. He’s weathered and compact, with wiry arms and legs and callused hands. Most of his face is a white beard, a shade lighter than his hair. His eyes, beneath thick scuffed spectacles, are red rimmed, blue and cheerful. Like mine, his voice has the clipped cadence of the American west, but is worn with age and rough as his hands.

Even so, it’s clear that in spite of his accent and the tiny vessel, bought sight unseen for a few thousand quid over the internet, Gary belongs here on the canal. I, by association, have gained some measure of acceptance. In his presence the black man, gray dreads to his knees, on the boat next door, nods hello, as if I’ve appeared out of the ether.

I’ve done a little research, in case I do get a story out of this trip. I know that the canals, a defining feature of the English countryside, were built in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, by landowners and industrialists, to ferry goods from inland towns to major trade and waterways. Today the canals are dominated by well-appointed narrow boats on which you can stay for holidays of up to three weeks. The Fjord Empress, for example, available for L1200-1500 a week through Anderson Canal boats of Cheshire, is a sixty-two foot floating apartment complete with toilet, shower, galley, and wifi (of course). It sleeps six. Other boats promise accommodations for up to twelve, if you don’t mind being stacked into bunkbeds like submariners.   

What I didn’t know is that a substantial number of people live year round on the canal. Boat people on “boat time,” with belongings strapped to every available surface. How many is hard to say, since canal dwellers are not allowed, without paying a mooring fee, to dock in one place for more than two weeks. They are required to keep touring. Plus, a number, like Gary, and his dread-locked neighbor, David, are from other countries.

David, a mellow, long limbed man, with dark skin and yellow smile, is from “an island near Jamaica.” He avoids specifics and I don’t press him. There is a feeling of cultivated anonymity about him, and about Eric, a Scotsman Gary stops to chat with as he walks me to the loo by the chandlery. Eric keeps touching his face, as if unaccustomed to the stubble he finds there; he has tousled blond hair, wears sagging jeans and a clean gray t-shirt. He’s been three weeks on the canals, living on this stumpy boat, which is black with blue trim and looks like a bruise. He bought it for ten thousand quid after leaving his job in London. Where he worked? He doesn’t say. How long he plans to live on the boat? He doesn’t know. Who did he leave behind? I don’t ask. His mannerisms are measured and forcefully calm, like some kind of aging Scottish dharma bum. In this age of oversharing, I find his reserve attractive, and somewhat suspect.

Gary is more forthcoming. He’s been on the canal since April. He wanted six weeks alone. His wife, back home in Eureka, California, will join him in June. “She wouldn’t have been happy,” he explains, “roughing it so long.” I suspect he’s right. He takes no uncertain pride in living on beans and rice in an open sailboat cabin, subject to the elements. “You need very little,” he says. “Very little to live.”

Eric and Gary talk electric motors and solar cells. Lulu, Eric’s French bulldog, jumps to shore and pisses on a piling. I might soon do the same, but eventually Gary says goodbye and keys me into a wooden outbuilding with a shower and toilet stall, twenty yards from the chandlery. 

A hundred and fifty pound fee gives him access to facilities like this--concrete floored, and clean enough--found up and down Britain’s canal system. The chandlery, also modest, is attached to a shoe box café and laundry facility where Gary introduces Joyce, who runs the place. Joyce lives in Nantwich. “Bunch a snobs,” she says. “I like these lot better. Even the fancy pants.” Reading my confused expression, she explains. “Some of these boats? A hundred thousand pounds to buy. Fancy,” she lowers her chin, looks at me beneath raised eyebrows, winks at Gary. “But you get other folks too, cheapies, like this one.” Gary grins back. Years come off him.

The two thousand pounds Gary spent on his boat is a pittance, especially if you consider the expense covers both accommodation and transportation for three months in the country. The solar panel and electric motor he rigged up means he pays nothing for fuel. I know he’s lived for the last forty years on his family farm in Eureka and if he’s like my uncle he’s got gold ingots buried in his back yard. But how much cash is at his disposal? It’s not an easy question to ask on a first date and really beside the point.
What I really want to know: if he has the means to travel more comfortably, why not? Why piss in a pot?

Choosing candor over tact I ask him. We’ve returned to the boat and motor upstream to a secluded spot, protected from the wind, where Gary will moor for the night. We sit across from each other in the open back, knees all but touching. I close my eyes and feel the touch of shadows and sunlight on my face. Under the bird song, I hear the burble of the electric engine and the gentle slap of water against fiberglass. Gary waves to a young fat couple on a bench, and they don’t wave back. The wind has risen. Spears of sunlight pierce the gathering clouds. Swans, swimming alongside, outpace us.  I feel no impulse to take notes, or to check my phone. After a few more minutes that chattering voice inside me, the list-maker, task-setter quiets. When Gary speaks again, I’ve all but forgotten my question.

“I graduated, all that,” he says. “Got a job with an engineering firm. Good job. Five years in, I left and bought this boat.” He pauses, running bony fingers across the hull. “Spent ten years sailing. The Great lakes, the Mississippi, up the eastern seaboard.”

“Wait. What?” I say, pulled from my reverie.  This new information splinters my simple judgment of him. “Ten years. You spent ten years…on this boat?”

“Same model. A Vivacity 20. No solar panels, course. Looked everywhere on-line for one just like it and here she was,” he pats the padded bench. ‘“Misty, in England.” 

I had assumed England or simply the canals had brought him here.  But these were secondary destinations. Looking off into the distance, beyond the fields, his expression now is one of unguarded wistfulness. I see the young man beneath the beard: pale face flush with color. For a moment, muscle fills out his hollow chest. In the sudden gust of land locked wind, I smell the sea, and I know Gary is stranded somewhere between this place, this time, and another time and place every bit as vivid in his memory. If I’d been outside myself, outside of time, I’m now stranded here with him in this suspended moment of melancholy, which breaks with the sound of the church bell chiming three.

Three! I look at my watch, and Gary, the spell broken, notices. Ducks flap away in a ruckus. “Your uncle’s cabin, in Washington,” he says. “I think that’s when I saw you last.” I remember the cabin. I don’t remember Gary. It’s thirty three years ago, and yesterday. “You were rushing around then too, weren’t you? Pigtails flying. Going where?” But he’s not looking at me anymore; his hand on the throttle, his eyes on the slow passing landscape. “Going where?”

I sit for a long time in my car after Gary walks me back to town. Watch him disappear up the road, comically out of place in stained Levis and flannel, saying “hi there!” “hello,” to any passing Brit. Out of place, yet perfectly at home in that English town. I sit there, though I haven’t asked half the questions I should have, were I to write a story. Sit there even though I’ll be home late, overcome by gratitude for this glimpse of a traveling life and vision of peace I didn’t know I’d been seeking.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
“You must not hate those who do harmful things. The compassionate thing is to do what you can to stop them – for they are harming themselves as well as those who suffer from their actions.” Dalai Lama - The Book of Joy

Her name was Nell and she was fourteen-years-old. Her best friend, Freya, saw her die, then spent the next two months in the hospital recovering from injuries suffered from the same suicide bomber. I didn’t know either girl. They were two of the stream of children who sauntered by my window each morning on their way to the Comprehensive School. They were two of the multitude of young people crowding Manchester Arena for a concert that night in May. They were two of the many dozens hurt or killed when a young man walked through the doors with a bomb on his back.

I won’t write his name, but I don’t hate him. Even now after the disbelief and fear have eased, I don’t hate him. Perhaps if I’d known Nell or Freya, or the other people he killed or wounded I would have no pity, no feeling but anger. But my soul grieves, too, for that naïve, feckless, soul- broken boy. For him, too, my heart breaks.

I don’t hate him, but I abhor ideologues and the demigods of every nation – yes, my own nation - who sanction violence and propagate fear, who feed off the flesh and of these young men no less than off flesh of the lives they take. Shame on you, and on your apologists. 

While cooking out on a recent Bank holiday,  a man’s pinched and indecipherable voice sounded over a loudspeaker. Urrscrapren! Urrscraperon. As the voice and the blue van from which it emanated came closer the word became three: Yourscrap Iron! Your scrap iron!

This was the “rag and bone man,” scavenging town for cast off household items. The occupation might exist in some form in the states, but it was a novelty to me. So I watched with fasciation as the van stopped next door. Two heavy white women in dirt streaked tank tops and jeans a size too small, climbed down. The largest walked in pain, dragging her left leg behind her,  but together they managed to heft the neighbor’s discarded exercise bike into the overstuffed boot. Then they carried on down the road, blasting the infernal recording, and leaving me, and only me in that party of Brits, enthralled.   

For centuries, rag and bone men, or totters, have been scavenging cast off household items in towns throughout Britain and Europe. The name describes what, in the 19th century, they collected.  Rags could be sold for up to three pence per pound to rag merchants or directly to rag paper makers. Bones, boiled to make soap and used for knife handles and other varied purposes, could be sold for the same price. Metals, such a copper or pewter, were more valuable: about four to five pence per pound. A rag and bone man might expect a six pence average daily wage in the 19th century, and while the trade has suffered in recent past, the high cost scrap iron has inspired a resurgence in the practice, which has never quite died away in northern towns near Manchester. 

Do these modern scavengers, working through such obvious pain,  make a living wage? Was this a second job? A third? I might have asked but I didn't want to slow them down, or to offend them with my curiosity.  After all, they were not the novel characters in the scene. I was.  What right did I have to waylay them or to ask about their lives?  Instead, I stood staring after them long after the blue van rounded the bend and the sound faded away. Yet, their figures, pained and prideful, still haunt me. For months I've wondered about them: about their work, their lives and homes and the families, and about the many generations of lives upon which their livelihood stands.


 
That other Rag and Bone Man:
If you’re need soulful sound track to accompany your day, here's Rag ‘n’ Bone Man, Rory Graham, from Uckfield, East Sussex.   
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3wKzyIN1yk&list=PL0ASAbNKu0z0ZHL1gwmKq348dSSixL8nn

I -Everywhere in the city we find fragments of the Wall.  There are shards embedded as markers in  pavement and sold with postcards. Even amongst the modern glass facades of the shopping district, we find ugly slabs of concrete on display.  Big, small,  jagged and weather-worn, most are tagged with spray paint and permanent marker, and the most common images are  female: women cradling emaciated sons; women weeping. Some are mildly obscene. All invite a closer look, sometimes a touch.  Never mind their value to knickknack sellers, these fragments retain value as memento mori to an era of irrational hate now resurfacing in altered, but recognizable forms.  

Later I learn this: when the wall fell, it fell by accident. A slip of the tongue by an East German news correspondent made it sound as if all travel restrictions had been lifted.  Restrictions had not yet been lifted, and might not have been lifted, completely. Yet, people from both sides (east and west) raced to the wall. They brought sledge hammers and ladders and beers, and the soldiers posted there, who had been trained to shoot, did not shoot.
 
II -  From without, the Jewish Museum is Borg-like, metallic and angular, with oddly shaped windows set deep. Cold looking and severe, the building is as uninviting as the history it holds. Inside, accessible by an austere bending staircase, we find a series of basement rooms with black floors and high, white walls. Buried within the walls are display cases with artifacts - letters, photographs, tea cups, spoons - of families who fled into exile, or stayed and were gathered up and murdered in the camps. There is no euphemistic phrasing, no “passed away” to suggest natural causes. The captions read something like: “Naomi stayed rather than abandon her aged mother and she was murdered in Auschwitz."
 
Nazism was a white nationalist movement built on racism and fed by fears of people who had lost standing, money, land, and loved ones in World War I. While it's true that a number of people openly and enthusiastically condoned Hitler's actions, a greater number chose to remain ignorant of the atrocities carried out in their names—or at least ignorant of the scope and extent of the evil. They remained quietly, even if not overtly, complicit.  I wonder, not then at the museum, but later, walking busy Berlin streets to the hotel:  how do the grandchildren of the silent collaborators shoulder the guilt of this complicity? 
 
I've heard stories of holocaust survivors, and of their children.  What they endured and overcame, if such experiences can be overcome, has been recorded and analyzed. But what of the sons of the guilty? How do they encounter these monuments to the dead everywhere in the city, without feeling unbearable responsibility? If they are Christians, how can they cry out, as Jesus did?  “Forgive them father they know not what they do!” When their fathers and mothers must have known. When not knowing demanded an active denial, a deliberate ignorance. The sons and daughters do not have the luxury of ignorance. They bear the sins of their fathers, and history's judgment.

I think about migrant farms workers back home. Families laboring in terrible conditions so that I might eat strawberries. How conveniently I push the knowledge of their labor to the back of my mind when wandering grocery store aisles. I think of kids in detention camps, families separated. My sin, too, is seasoned ambivalence to the suffering of others.  I think of a Trump voter, a friend of friend, who insisted at a dinner party that she slept well for the first time in years on the night of the election. "We suffered so much under Obama. For eight years we suffered.” I could feel the anxiety beneath her elation, and considered saying nothing. Then I asked: “How? How did you suffer? Who is we?”

Her hair was dyed blond and bobbed. She wore flannel shirt, pearls and heels and drove a six-year-old Mercedes. She had two homes and had just finished telling us, in engaging detail - this was a dinner party - about her property business. But here she offered only generalities: about the terrorists, the illegals. "Obama lied. We suffered." 

I think of her this night in Berlin, darkness falling, the shopping district blinking back tears of a rainy night. There is nothing general about suffering. Suffering is specific. Families divided. Loved one killed, starved, tortured in the name of what? False promises. The terrible legacy of tyranny is built on generalities and false promises.   

"The real voyage of discovery," said Marcel Proust, "consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."

I love this idea, but I don't agree. The voyage out and the ability to see anew are lock and key to discovery.



   I was a twenty-two year old grad student the first time I lived in Britain, a has-been collegiate athlete  who’d spent as much time on a basketball court as in a classroom and I was conscious of the deliberate shift the move demanded. No basketball, no family within five thousand miles, no idea, beyond a desire to write, what I wanted to do. I had come not only to discover another county but to discover someone I didn’t yet know well - an old, casual acquaintance whose charms I ignored except for a few flirtations, but who had, in the last several years, become bolder, more insistent and talkative. I met her in Wales, where for the first time unfettered by dreams of athletic success, I fell in love with this other self.

It’s a funny thing falling in love with your self, or rather with aspects, which in the company of people who’ve known you since infancy, remain folded safely away. In Wales, I could not say, “I am a basketball player.” The sport had little credence in that country. Women played net ball, a variation of the game that prohibits dribbling, and from what I could tell, jumping. Nor could I yet say, “I am a writer.” I was a traveler, a student, and girded by those flimsy definitions, the walls of my identity loosened, allowed other incantations to wander and explore.

This trip is different. This time I am married with a child. I’ve published books, and will be deep in another while I'm here. My identity and obligations trail behind like a cape sewn into the skin, but is comfortable for all that. Now, when I travel this country I'm looking through three sets of eyes: my husband’s, who grew up here and for whom every corner holds memories; through my son’s who at four assumes all new things to be ordinary because everything in his life is new. Children are tourists in their own lives, viewing the world with wary and shameless wonder.  And of course I look still through a foreigner's eyes, with guarded wonder,  marking every difference as a reflection of who I am or might be.